


A Little White Lie

by Prix



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Accidental hero, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Depression, Gen, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2021-01-15 12:15:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21253241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prix/pseuds/Prix
Summary: Rose can't bring herself to tell the Doctor how she has really been adjusting to life in Pete's World. This is the story of what Rose didn't do and how she decided to make a little white lie reality.





	A Little White Lie

**Author's Note:**

> For my [trope_bingo](http://trope-bingo.dreamwidth.org) card for the "[Accidental Hero](https://prixmium.dreamwidth.org/15190.html)" prompt. Applicable in the sense that I think that Rose obviously ultimately did get involved with the world and universe saving business but that I think she would have had a hard time motivating herself to do so at first. I remember this being a point of fandom discussion in like 2007. I don't know if anyone cares anymore, but I'm trying to get back into writing the things that used to keep me company in my head. 
> 
> Depression isn't pretty. Rose is kind of mean sometimes in this but not without remorse.

The real truth is that she hasn’t done much of anything on this new Earth. _ Pete’s World_, the Doctor had called it. And for all relevant intents and purposes, it has been so far. 

She told the Doctor she was with Torchwood now. It was slightly more true than saying she was back working in the mirror version of Henrik’s he hadn’t managed to blow up, but only just. 

It was like Bring Your Daughter to Work Day. Every day. At least it had been for the past month or so. Going on four weeks. 

It had gone something like this: 

Those first couple of weeks had been nothing but pain for her. The strange thing was that the agony was a sort of focus of its own. She’d kept count of the days that way. She’d memorized the patterns on the duvet and the shapes of walls. She was in someone’s house and a bedroom that had never been her home, that wasn’t meant for her. And every day she awakened at a different time. 

She knew that the worst of it might be passing when she started to get up and do something like drink a glass of water, brush her teeth, or rummage around the kitchen in a languid fashion that suggested that she wasn’t even sure what a kitchen was meant to have in it before she found herself curled about her middle, wracked by heaving sobs that seemed intent on cutting some internal part of her in two.

Enough of her mother petting her and Mickey coming in and out of the room she occupied with hardened glances that betrayed worry all the same, and the sobbing started to skip some days. 

“You ought to try getting out of the house,” Jackie implored with a tilt of her head. 

“You couldn’t _ wait _ to have me back,” Rose said with some bite and a look right past her, through the walls and through the very fabric of reality. She knew it wasn’t fair. 

“You could always come to work with me,” Pete said, not having any idea how patronising it sounded to her ears. She just held her cup tighter in both hands as if she meant to make the warm stoneware crumble. She’d stared into it like a fortune-teller, knowing it wouldn’t say anything back. “I’d say you know a thing or two that would put the boys to shame…” 

“Bet I do,” Rose replied sullenly. In the back of her mind, she had wondered what it would have been like if she’d had a father as a teenager. Probably something like that. 

She didn’t think Pete had missed much, at least. 

But they kept talking to her, off and on at least, even when talking to her had probably been a sort of nightmare, walking on shards of glass more than eggshells. 

One day, when her mother and Pete were out enjoying each other’s company somewhere away from her, she heard the door open. She heard boots fall heavily beside it. She heard someone lock the door. She felt the tension of a nightmare run up her back, as if the break of the silence was some kind of threat. She had no reason to feel that way, and a part of her almost wondered if she was itching for the adrenaline. 

Then, just as suddenly as the flirtation with motivation had come, she sighed and let her shoulders slump. 

“Mickey?” she called, inclining her head just a little to listen. She wrapped her arms around her knees, hugging herself and the blanket close. She was sitting on the sofa rather in the dark. There was a bit of bluish-grey light leaking in through the windows. 

“Yeah?” Mickey asked as he came through the kitchen and wound his way through the large house into the sitting room.

Rose relaxed a little more out of something that wasn’t so much habit as it was instinct at this point. She was safe. Everything was fine. Everything was the same. It was only Mickey. 

The way that was unfair sometimes crept its way into her conscience through the silence that she lived with and in now. 

“You need something?” Mickey asked as he appeared in the doorway. He had taken off his shoes but was otherwise still in very vague-and-shadow-y organization agent sort of clothes. Rose tilted her head to watch him move through the shadows toward the couch. As quickly as she had, he reached a lamp and switched it on. “Sitting in the dark,” he remarked. 

“No,” Rose replied, averting her eyes. She pulled her feet in closer, and without apparent intent Mickey sat down on the opposite end of the couch. She caught him looking at her, but as quickly as she had, he looked away and reached out for the television remote. He switched it on and started scanning through the channels at ten second intervals. She couldn’t focus on it enough to be annoyed. Instead, she just watched him. 

She thought she could write a book on understanding Mickey Smith. The way he moved, the way he spoke, and the things he didn’t say. But she never had, and she didn’t really know that she knew him that well at all anymore. She set her jaw for an instant and decided to ask. 

“Mickey?” she prompted softly. 

“Uh-huh,” he answered. He set the remote down when he had tuned it to some channel or other. He looked down the length of the couch to meet her eyes. 

“Why d’you live here?” 

She knew better than to ask these questions. She had known none of them out be fair. 

“Well, I… kind of… felt like they needed me to.” 

“What, because of me?” Rose asked, but not for the reason she had half-feared and half-expected. 

“No. Yes. No, not just because of you,” Mickey said. He reached over and jabbed the power button on the TV remote, darkening the room by that much again as he kept staring at her incredulously. “What’s this about?” he demanded with a bit more steel than she anticipated. 

“Nothing,” she said, looking down and picking at nothing on her fingernails. Maybe not nothing. A couple of them were crooked and could do with some care. 

“You meant something by it.” 

“I was just trying to say that if you’re here because of me…” she said, but she couldn’t even finish saying it. It was too cruel. She knew that he had cared about her. Before the Doctor. Before Jimmy Stones. Before she’d ever slept with him and after she’d stopped. It wasn’t _ fair_. 

“Look, it’s not just because of you. The entire world doesn’t revolve around you,” Mickey snapped. And she felt it settle like a stone into her stomach, and she knew what was coming before he could say it. “In fact…” 

“... I didn’t even exist in it,” Rose said, hard and fast, trying to beat him to the punch. She stayed curled into a ball on the couch, hugging her knees, but her voice had projected through it in a way that would have worried her mum had she been home. She breathed a little raggedly. 

Mickey’s face fell and maybe sort of softened. 

“... Yeah,” he agreed after a moment’s hesitation. He huffed a bit of breath outward and adjusted his posture, unwinding some of the now directionless energy. “So stop worrying about it,” he offered as if that were some consolation. 

They sat in awkward silence for a few moments. Rose watched Mickey stare at the television remote as if it were some kind of escape that he was considering the honour of. 

“Do you care that I’m here?” she asked. For good or ill, she figured. 

“Sure,” Mickey replied quickly. 

“‘Sure,’” Rose repeated. 

“What do you want, Rose?” Mickey asked with a patient sigh as he looked at her. 

“Why do I have to want anything?” 

“That’s sort of the problem.” 

Rose ground her teeth, knowing he was right. She stared at him, feeling purposeless defiance search for some kind of outlet. Her hands tightened into fists, balled into the blanket over her knees. 

“What should I want? You?” 

“Anything, Rose!” Mickey said, exasperated and completely undeterred by the nasty sort of suggestion Rose knew she had put in force behind it. “Look, I’m sorry you didn’t get to pick your side, but you’re on it now, so you’ve got to make some kind of life for yourself. I did.” 

And there it is. The answer she hadn’t really known she was looking for. Mickey had gone and actually made a life for himself. It wasn’t just a performance art piece, trying to convince her or himself that he had moved on. He had gone and properly made a life where he had learned to live with the notion that he would probably never see her again. 

And _ good riddance _, but that wasn’t fair, either. Rose turned over, but all she managed to do was uncurl enough to rest her ankles against the coffee table. She leaned her head back against the back of the sofa, staring up at the ceiling. 

“So you don’t want to sleep with me?” Rose asked. She felt a strange kind of disconnect, like she was floating above her body. Only it wasn’t the kind of floating that came with being drunk or trying pills no one should have had when she was a teenager. It was the kind of floating that happened when she had been seconds from death before the adrenaline anchored her back in her body. It was a soul lightness that could almost believe that nothing that happened next even mattered, even if it was only the illusion of a survival mechanism. 

“No,” Mickey said, chuckling in a way that might have been bitter but Rose chose to interpret as awkward and dismissive, “I don’t.” 

“‘Kay,” Rose said, hearing her voice breathy and high and far away. She closed her eyes. She felt them burn at the memory of something. Then, without explanation or word, she got up and carried the blanket with her back to her bedroom. 

Some time not very long after that, she had awakened sometime around daylight. She’d been hearing _ him _ in her sleep again, but she knew it was just a memory. It was an itch, one she couldn’t scratch ever again, and she knew she couldn’t just keep sitting with it all day. 

She had padded into the kitchen in her pajamas, a fuzzy bathrobe pulled around her to cover her braless t-shirt politely as she approached Pete. He was making coffee, already dressed except for coat or jacket. 

“Look sharp,” she said from the doorway, leaning against it. She rubbed the top of one foot over the other. They were cold. 

“Good morning, Rose,” he said with a tight but genuine smile as he looked over at her. 

“How are things getting on?” she asked. 

“Oh. They’re… much the same as always, working in the line of the weird and terrible and sometimes-incredible.” 

Rose rolled her eyes and smiled without inhibition. 

“Tell me about it,” she said _ right _ before it caught up with her. She started to stare down at the floor, feeling her focus go hazy and a bit wet. 

Pete came closer and she hardly noticed, but then he offered her a cup of coffee. She knew that he took his own black and drank it early in the morning in spite of the fact that he preferred tea at heart. She noticed that some milk had appeared in the cup her offered her, and she wondered how long he had been making it. She reached out and took it into both hands and held it for the warmth if nothing else. She looked up and met his eyes because he gave her little choice. 

“Hey there,” he said, and she could tell almost instantly that he just _ knew_. He could see the grief, because he’d felt it, and that was as dizzying a sensation as any. It made it real again, but it also made it maybe just a little bit easier. 

“Yeah,” she said, smiling tightly. She didn’t say anything else about it. 

“You could still come into Torchwood with me. I’m the director, and you’re sort of my daughter, so there’s no reason you have to commit before you see it,” Pete offered with a hint of wry humour that she appreciated.

She kept smiling, though she didn’t think she gave him anything else with her eyes.

“I’ll think about it,” she promised.

And she did think about it, but she didn’t make up her mind until a couple weeks later.

It didn’t strike her as suspicious, the four of them eating a meal together. Not anymore. Things had settled into a kind of routine, and they didn’t avoid bringing her into it at all costs anymore. But then Mickey had retired to the living room, and she was still sitting at the dining table, and Jackie had gone to her room – their room – to get something.

She had started to talk shop with Pete sometimes. She knew what he was doing. Wearing her down. She knew it was happening, and she didn’t think she minded. It was a welcome distraction, and it kept her from thinking about the fact that she didn’t want to need a distraction.

Then Jackie had come back into the room with a quicker step than she usually preferred.

Rose looked up from her thoughts and caught the nervous glances between Jackie and Pete. They were warm but wide-eyed and had the faintest hint of terror. She lowered a foot down from having had it pulled impolitely up into the chair. Both feet were planted firmly on the floor, ready to move, before she asked.

“What?”

“Well, sweetheart,” Jackie said, as she sat down beside her. She reached out and placed her hand over Rose’s in the way that she had when she had been trying to pet and soothe her weeks ago without getting too close. Rose stared at her lotion-softened hand with growing suspicion. Then she was staring past her mother and at Pete. “… Your father and I,” she said and Rose didn’t bristle at that part anymore, “have something to tell you.”

“What… What is it?” she asked. She felt her heart beating faster. She glanced around as if some sort of machine or otherworldly creature might burst through a wall at any moment. Again, she warred with the vague sense that some part of her wanted it to be true. And then the bombshell dropped.

“Well, I would’ve thought that I was too old, but...” Jackie said with a cluck of her tongue. Then she was bright as Christmas. “I’m going to have a baby! Your father and I are going to have you a little baby brother or sister!”

Rose’s eyes were fixed back on her mum. She couldn’t look away until she had blinked several times. Then she gave a second-long glance to Pete Tyler and couldn’t look at him anymore. She looked away from both of them and down at her lap. She gently, slowly, pulled her hand back from Jackie’s. She folded her arms across her chest, and for a moment she experienced a kind of embarrassment she had never had the opportunity to experience before.

Another furtive glance up and Pete and Jackie, and she had to deal with the full force of a decade’s missing embarrassment of the knowledge that her mother slept with a man who at least looked like, sounded like, and felt like her _ father _. Then she closed her eyes, drew a deep breath, and called to mind her twenty years worth of training in being a human being.

She opened her eyes, plastered on a grin, pointedly only met her _ mother’s _ eyes at first. Then she slowly grew into the smile and managed to look at Pete, no harm done.

“That’s great!” she’d said, and other things like it. And she’d meant it. But sometime the following afternoon, she had known that another morning wouldn’t go by without her at least trying to go into work with Pete.

She couldn’t handle day in and day out with open and proudly pregnant Jackie Tyler.

And so she had gotten the grand tour of Torchwood. It was flashy and blippy and she got a keycard that gave her access to _ most _ of the facility, just by merit of being Pete Tyler’s sort-of-daughter. It didn’t sit well with her, but then nothing did.

There had been some excitement on Mickey’s part. He had shelved any rightful resentment he had left when she had started to actually act like a person again. Jake had offered her a warmer welcome than she had ever earned from him either. 

But that initial burst of energy, the sense that she might be the chosen one or the protagonist in this particular story, had quickly faded away when she had shown every little interest in doing anything in the field. She didn’t show a real interest in becoming an _ agent _ or an _ operative _ or whatever it was they called it. 

She wasn’t sure if it was the Doctor or if it had just been a part of her nature from the beginning, but she didn’t really trust the establishment that bore the name of the thing that had torn her life apart. She knew they were trying to do good, but she didn’t really like watching them suit up, go undercover, carry weapons, or march around saying “Yes, sir,” and “Roger that.” 

She didn’t hate it, either. 

The real truth was that she had been waiting. The dreams that had sounded like the Doctor became more and more real, and she wasn’t sure if it was wishful thinking, but a part of her just _ hoped _. And hoped. That this would just be biding her time. That sitting there in an understaffed office flipping through through shiny binders from time to time with all the information that was redacted from the rest of the world was helping-enough. That he would come to get her. That she could go home. 

And one day in Norway, all of that hope had dried up like a desert. 

She had told the Doctor that there was still a Torchwood on this planet. That it was open for business. 

And so after another round and wrenching sobs that had tried to tear her apart all the way back home, she had gotten into the shower. And she’d slept. And another day of doing nothing but staring at the walls. And Jackie had guilted her into eating a little. And she’d almost vomited, and then she’d slept. And the second say, she got into the shower and sobbed again. That wasn’t that bad. Showers were always murder, even in the weeks before everything she had wanted had been dangled in front of her and then snuffed out. 

But after the shower and blowing her nose and smearing makeup in the right places to make herself look like something slightly more than a zombie, she realized that she couldn’t go through all of that again. 

And so she went back into Torchwood wearing slightly more form-fitting clothes. The sort of thing she could move in, not the sort of thing she meant to flash. She’d cleared her eyes all except for the irritated red of the skin just around them she couldn’t conceal. 

“What’s going on with you?” Mickey asked, and this time she didn’t resent the question. He had come all the way to Norway, even though she honestly hadn’t been very nice to him. 

She smiled a tight, forced sort of smile that aimed for genuine as she wrapped her hair with a band, tying it behind her head and out of her face. 

“I thought I’d let you teach me some things,” she said. 

“Pete got anything to say about that?” 

“He’ll probably thank me,” she said. She glanced up in the direction of his office and shrugged. She hadn’t exactly talked to him or anyone about this. She knew that if she didn’t just throw herself into it, she wouldn’t do it. “I told the Doctor I worked with Torchwood. I… can’t let him down,” she said very softly, coming close enough to tiptoe and speak lowly, not quite whispering, near Mickey’s ear. Then she looked up at him, flat on her feet, hoping. 

“So you’re just going to start… going out there and doing _ this _ because of something you said…” 

“Yes,” Rose said before he could carry on any further. 

Mickey looked away, rolled his shoulders a bit, and then looked back at her with a sort of cocky smirk. 

“Well, I guess I could show you the ropes,” he said, and she felt a kind of familial thankfulness that made her regret ever questioning why he’d been staying with her parents. 

“I guess this means I have to learn to use a gun,” Rose said flatly. 

“Afraid so. But we don’t shoot ‘em that much. Better things to do than that,” Mickey said, and he nodded in the direction of the lift for her to follow him elsewhere to start doing _ something _ to defend the Earth. She could try, even if it would never quite be the same. It wasn’t what he’d wanted or what she’d wanted, but she thought he might want it for her. 


End file.
